The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - The Sporting Class: NCAA March Madness Expansion

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Meadowlark Media CEO John Skipper and Nothing Personal's David Samson are back with another episode with host of Pablo Torre Finds Out ... Pablo Torre! Welcome to the Sporting Class! It’s tournament time! Have you embraced March Madness? It looks like the NCAA wants to expand the tournament to even more teams. Why? Let's talk through the reasons. This year is a BIG year for women’s basketball. LSU! UCONN! Caitlin Clark! Juju Watkins! Outside of the games, we have a story about Kim Mulkey, that’s about a yet to be released story. She came out swinging saying she’s going to sue the Washington Post over it. How are these PR tactics? Then, Shohei Ohtani is the face of baseball. Shohei Ohtani is now also the face of one of the biggest investigations in the sports world too. Did his interpreter steal money for gambling debts? Did he know? Will MLB suspend him? Plus, we now have an issue in the NBA that Raptors’ Jontay Porter is under investigation for a prop bet scandal. Porter ‘unders’ hit in a very suspicious way. The league is looking into it. Hmm. Meanwhile, the NCAA wants to do away with all prop bets. Many states already don’t allow it. Who should control that if any single entity? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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clinical trial by a new infant formula company in a quarter century with clinically proven This is the Dan Lebatore Show with the StuGuts Podcast. David's already nervous that there's not enough time to do all the topics we have today. It's too much today. There's a lot, John. There's a lot going on in the world of sports business and rich dudes knowing stuff about how rich dudes do stuff. Say that three times. Rich dudes only fans, as I like to call this show.

John Skipper, David Sampson, hello. I feel like we should start with the tournament, John. The tournament, the NCAA tournament is happening. And I don't wanna talk about the specific results as much as I wanna talk about the business of this because the business as you see it, John, is ripe for change, for expansion, for enrichment potentially?

Well, I think you're going to have a continuing conflict between the big schools, the big conferences, and how they run the tournament. And I'm amused that somebody thinks the way to solve all this is just add eight more teams I'm not sure What problem you're solving by add eight more teams? this is like a couple getting married that can only has a facility can hold a hundred people and they keep Looking at their list and going we got to add more because we can't we can't offend the Brewsters we got to get them there. So I guess this is we can't offend Pittsburgh and we can't offend St. John's. So we need to let in eight more teams. All that means there'll be eight new teams who are mad that they didn't get in. So I don't know what problem you're solving.

Ultimately, I believe, and I've said it on this show many times, I believe the big schools will eventually create their own tournament. I know everybody loves Cinderella, but I don't know, is anybody unhappy that all the best teams, all the one and two seeds have made it through? I'm pretty happy about that. Of course, that includes North Carolina. Yeah, I was going to say. People are unhappy.

Yeah, I, as a non-North Carolinian. I'm a little bummed. And how exactly are people expressing this unhappiness by not watching the games featuring North Carolina and Alabama? There's just a little bit, there's a down-tick in excitement. When there's a Cinderella, when there's a Cinderella story, think about when Oakland had their great run of 24 hours, the NIL deals that came the way of that player who wouldn't shoot twos.

I'm just fascinated by your point of view though, John, because of course, when you're on the other side of the table, you want as many games as possible. So you'd love expansion of the tournament, and you love the storylines. And if you're the NCAA, you want as many teams as possible because you're getting paid more money for it. So the March Madness TV deal is worth more if there's more games.

So there's great incentive to expand it, having nothing to do with the snubs. There's a hunger for more inventory. I'm not positive that there's that much hunger for more inventory of more mediocre teams. And there's always been in our world, basketball world, until fairly recently. Are they playing the NIT this year? Yes. I briefly- Despite it being rejected by numerous coaches like Rick Pitino of St. John's, aforementioned, it is going on. Okay, so there's no reason for us not to have two tournaments. We have a tournament for the big teams, and we have a tournament for the little teams.

That's mostly what happens in the rest of the sports. They don't have a national football, they have a division two football championship, a division three football championship. I am viscerally- So unless you're his team- I'm viscerally offended by John's vision for the NCAA tournament.

It's a horrific vision. And it's funny given that when you stewarded ESPN, I was happy to watch curling at three in the morning. So there was an appetite for all sorts of different sports at different times. You've never heard me say, this is a tournament I prefer. I am telling you, this is the tournament

we're going to get at some point because the big schools, the big conferences want more and more of the money and a big pot of money is the pot of money that those folks in Indianapolis spend to have a year-round presence. The basketball tournament pays for the governance of those big conferences that those conferences don't want. They do not want Charlie Baker to tell them what to do. You want to get rid of automatic bids. That's it.

No more Ivy League bid. No more. Well, Don's even going to step beyond that. He's doing something. He's alluding, I think, to something that Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the SEC, one of the aforementioned giants that are actually running college sports in general. Greg Sankey said that smaller schools are stealing bids and that, yeah, he wants to, of course, have more of the big schools, the SEC schools, assured spots inside of a tournament

every year. Does that sound familiar? It sounds like what they, the CFP, doesn't it? It sounds like literally everything which goes back to the Super League as a concept. The CFP is going to manage to exist for 20 years and never create a tournament that has the right number of teams in. They seem determined to either shoot themselves in the foot that they don't have a team in the tournament. That's five commissioners creating a tournament of four then they're gonna go to 12 big ten and

SEC I guess tell them that's not enough because we're gonna need to get at least four of our teams in so they're gonna go to 14 go to 16, but that's an easy thing to do you play Eight games four games two, and you're done. But some of them want buys. I'm glad they won't buy. Who cares what they want? What do you mean they won't buy? Now all we're going to have is... But they're running it. You're saying things from both sides of your mouth. You're saying that no NCAA, they're going to do their own internal governance, just have the big conferences

do it. The big conferences say they want buys, and then you say, who cares what they want? If they're governing themselves, then we'll have no governor on what happens. I don't disagree, but all you're gonna do is end up with whoever's third and fourth complaining that they should have been first and second. You're gonna have at least two teams who are gonna say, why are we not in?

You're still gonna have a Florida state situation. I would, the easiest thing to do is to have four conferences and they each get their one through four teams in. And that's a simple way to not have any argument. You take the bowl system, you invite all the other teams, let them play in the bowls. But on the college basketball front, it's interesting too that the ACC gets to feel like a big football conference, right? Like that's,

this is their event. The college football playoff, the NCAA tournament in basketball. Well, the NCAA NCAA tournament in basketball, they have proved year after year that they're going to outpunch what Ken Palm or whoever always analytic companies say that they're not good they get in, Clemson gets in, they're in the final 16. There are four ACC teams in the final 16 and there almost always is an ACC team in the final four. So your view is put the ACC right into the sweet 16, have them get buys right there. No.

UNC is always there. No. UNC will always be there, David, other than last year. Well, I want to get every year, but last year. John wants to have a sponsor's exemption for North Carolina every year. But what does it look like, though? Right. So let's actually get to your vision, right? Let's say there's a Super League style NCAA tournament.

What does that really mean in terms of who's in what? What's the cutoff for being who gets to be in the super league, I guess? Well, I don't know. It's too hard, by the way, you can't get to what I'm talking about. You've got an insolven, unsolvable conflict, which is, which is that the big conferences are going to won't eventually to get all that money. that the big conferences are going to won't eventually to get all that money and the teams that should be, that stops in the top four conferences, you already got too many intruders,

though I'm not gonna name them, in those conferences to do what they really wanna do. I have some solutions. Can we talk solutions? Yes, please. Because my view is that in everything where there is competition, there are snubs. Everything, whether it's the Oscars,

whatever awards ceremony, whether it's a tournament, there's always people who feel they're not getting what they deserve. So I try to put that when you're leading an organization, you have to put that to the side. I don't think they sit around Baker and the NCAA. I don't think they sit around saying, oh, we have to solve for the snub issue.

That's not to me, forefront. My solution is that I'm working with the broadcast partners because that's the money we're talking about. And I wanna know the exact amount of inventory they want across all of their platforms. I wanna know, can I spread out between Turner, Warner Brothers Discovery, CBS, all the different channels, can I spread out between Turner, Warner Brothers Discovery, CBS, all the different channels, can I get ESPN involved,

can I get MetalArk involved? What's your appetite for a 96 team tournament? What is the incremental benefit that we will receive for those extra teams? And I'm negotiating right to the edge where it's the law of diminishing returns, where if we go to 97 teams, there's no increase from 96. 64 is not it, so they went to 68, the play-in.

Is that what it's called, the play-in? When the teams- The first four? The first four. So I don't think that's it either. I think there's gonna be more, and I think you're gonna see over the next contract, more partners because all this hogwash about

I don't know where to find the games, it's very easy to find games. So I think you're gonna have more teams, there will not be a super conference, there will still be the NCAA, and there will still be automatic bids. Why? Because the conference tournaments,

that is a revenue producer for the schools and for the networks. They get to show those and automatic bids. If you eliminate the right of a conference champion to get in, then why play the conference tournament? You kill off David. David. You kill off Yale. Yeah. I would have the glass play and the David's play, 64 teams in each, which gives you the most possible inventory, allows you

to bring in new partners that would make the most money and you'd end up with two champions. So boring. I want the David to have a chance. That's the whole point of the NCAA tournament is that you can have a David run. Well that's what fans sort of think. Do you believe, do you believe they vote with their eyeballs? You think that? I get what John's saying.

I hate this idea and yet I'm like, can I convince America to not watch these games? Yeah, I, I, then you're agreeing with me. If America will watch games, if they're part of the tournament, because it's win and continue or losing your out. And anytime you can get a close game in the NCAA tournament with an upset, you get a news alerts pushed to your phone, upset alert turned to the game now.

So in terms of attention and discussion, there's no question that upsets drive this thing. It's why I love the NCAA tournament inherently. I'm the guy who picks 16 seat over a one seat every single year, no matter what. But what I guess I'm wondering is, if audience will not be a check on the manifest destiny of we want to have the big school tournament

because we can get more money that way, then what's stopping them? That what's stopping them is getting coordinated and getting people to think they can do it. By the way, nobody, while you say everybody wants that, what does the network want? They want Duke, Kentucky. Only at the end. And they do not want anybody to upset Duke in Kentucky because the highest rated games in the tournament are the six possible games

that Duke, Kentucky, Yukon, North Carolina, Arizona, that's what they want. The networks for the most part would really like chalk. They want the best teams to win in advance because every time Kentucky, the five games Kentucky didn't get to play cost the network money. Wow. Can you quantify that? No. I mean, I'm trying to understand the difference on April 8th. When you've got a Duke plane, a Cinderella team, you're saying that incrementally Duke playing Kentucky would have been better by X the factor of X and that impacts what they offer

the NCAA over the life of a tournament? Yes. I'm interested to hear that because I don't. The only revenue really that CBS true, TBS can generate is ad sales. I mean, they are getting some fees from the pay television system, but the amount of people who watch is directly correlated

to the amount of ad revenue they can recognize. So what you're saying that you're saying is that boring from a sports conversation perspective, even from a viewership perspective, as a fan eager to watch a game is not the same as the total tonnage of eyeballs to me because of the demographics of how big these fan bases are. In baseball, did anybody ever want you to make the World Series?

No, but it's not as big a appointment viewing as the NCAA final game is. So I view the NCAA final game differently, like I view the Super Bowl differently. I'm not sure that ESPN would say to itself, hey, why can't we have Dallas against, you know, the Chiefs? That'd be ideal, but if somehow a team makes a run

to the Super Bowl that has, you know, Taylor Swift's boyfriend on it, it's a positive because you're getting different demographics, you're getting great viewers who just watch that game no matter who's playing, and I view that NCAA tournament the final game as well. The real money and the reason why the Contracts were so much is it's multiple weekends

Where you're keeping the attention and you're able to program around it during the weeks in between Sunday to Thursday when there's no games for the first two three weeks That's why I want to sit with the network and get an idea of how many more weekends Do you need right how in your calendar? How many can we take? Yeah, I'm not sure you can how many more weekends do you need? Right. In your calendar, how many can we take? Yeah, I'm not sure you can take many more weekends. It can take more games, right? You can put more games on, but I don't think they can take many more weekends

because most of them have something. Somebody, CBS and CBS runs right into the Masters. They can't go the next weekend. I was thinking the weekend prior, but that's something that people don't talk enough about and fascinates me is the programming schedule the networks have, where people used to complain to me, why don't you move the World Series into this weekend?

And we would say, well, actually, Fox can't show at that weekend. So we literally don't have an opportunity. We have to go to Fox for a rain out and when to reschedule it. Right. I want to know what to do with the NIT, John, because here's this seemingly distressed asset

and we've discovered that, okay, a lot can change in this tournament genre. What do you do with it? If I was in NIT, I would try to work with smaller conferences and convince them that they will get more members in if they participate in that conference And they'll get the same money

Hmm, I assume that's what they do Anyway, the NIT was always the people who couldn't make the NCAA tournament and it was always a nice thing to win the NIT tournament Yeah, I can't remember who won last year, but I couldn't remember who won the NCAA tournament either until I read the Connecticut's repeating I'm terrible at that. Yeah, your general cognitive function, not necessarily representative of. Do you know who won the IT last year? Of course not.

What are you talking about? Of course not. But the point being that you not knowing either champion is not indicative of the equivalency between these two products. And the question then becomes, if you're the NIT, how do you fit into this strategy? Is there room for this other thing?

And and this gets us, of course, by the way, to the other other thing, which is the women's NCAA tournament. While we're all wringing our hands about the men is actually clearly like on a trajectory that is. Unprecedented, unthinkable trajectory that is unprecedented, unthinkable and now resetting John, it seems, expectations that previous presidents of media companies might've had for what this is.

This is a classic, right? This is the, everything that people predict will happen, happens slower than anybody thinks until it finally begins to happen and then it's fast happens fast and this has happened really fast yeah and I do not think it's a blip I think that this is a permanent change and that people are gonna care I think the last number I saw was that the women's tournament is up 180% in viewing and it's not just Caitlin Clark with it is it's a blip I

Don't think it is. I think you'll have very good I always thought that when the women's tournament is genuinely competitive when there are enough good players That you actually care and whether actually can be upset it will matter Before you con was so dominant you, Tennessee, Louisiana Tech were so dominant that it wasn't that interesting. Now, it's quite interesting because the players, there are lots and lots of good players. And Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark and Juju Watkins will be replaced by three women after that who will be just as dynamic and good and the tournament will do very well because you got those uniforms on.

So the people of Ohio State care now because they're pretty good. South Carolina, there's a lot of good teams and there have been upsets this year and there have been standout players. So I think this is a sign of things to come to me. And Hidalgo at Notre Dame. I mean, the list goes on in terms of just like people, players who are becoming characters that can seemingly drive viewership.

But David is, you're selling high is what you're saying. I'm selling high because I'm selling the Caitlin Clark effect. I've never seen an athlete like her. I've never seen someone grab the attention. It's the equivalent of Fernando mania. God, that's aging me. But take Linsanity,

take whatever example you want. I didn't say that just because of your involvement in the show. Sorry, don't wanna marginalize you. Anything that you can just, that is a moment, and this is a moment for women as it should have been for decades and centuries, this is where there's more attention on women's sports granted.

But what you're seeing in the shape of the curve is not solely because of that, that now we're recognizing women as equals, which should have happened forever ago. Kailin Clark has made that curve change, and she's gonna go to the Indiana Fever and try to make the WNBA's curve change, but it's gonna come at the expense

of the college basketball curve. She can't be in two places at once. So I don't believe that she will have the ability. We could argue whether she'll be this successful in the WNBA, but I understand why you want it to be the case where you want this sustained improvement in everything, but I think you'd agree, the slope of the curve is not sustainable.

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more at biard.com. Well, it doesn't need to be. Well, the slope of the curve is sustainable. It will level out. It won't go up another 180% next year, but it's not going to return to previous levels, I don't think. There's too many good players. And because of Caitlin Clark, many, many more people have watched the games and they're discovering that these women can really play. That is that is true. Well, it also I think the argument here is about the steepness of the increase, right?

And is there going to be a decline as a function of simply that? But meanwhile, I want to point out like WNBA viewership again, everything is up because out of home viewing has been factored in for those sports TV ratings nerds out there. You know this Nielsen factoring in bars and all that stuff hotels, blah, blah, blah. But the WNBA finals 2023 highest viewership on TV in 20 years. Those numbers all seem to be trending in a direction, John. And look, I just be real about though WNBA, a contract that Eastpand has held for a long time, it just seems like a materially different product

than what it was considered before, which is like the piggyback thing you get if you get the MBA. Well, I think they're talking about separating the rights deals for the first time. Right. Which would be a good idea, I think, because they should get that value.

And again, I will, I'll agree with you on one thing. I will take the over under that I was ratings will go down next year. Good boy. Talk about adding value to our audience right there. That's so good. Let's. I don't think they'll buy forget the ratings so fast

because WNBA will go out into the market and realize that it would actually be a blight on their reputation when they see what the value is on its own and when you can tuck it in under a new NBA deal, which Adam is negotiating, that's going to be a huge increase. You can then allocate a number to the WNBA that would show the WNBA increasing at a number that may be artificially inflated. So I actually think that it would be silly of them to separate now.

It's too early, you're saying. Yes, sir. I want to stay with the women's game because there's another story about, let's call it, PR management. Because Kim Mulkey, the head coach in question here of LSU, she's threatening to sue The Washington Post and has done this in public over a piece yet to be released as of press time for us by Kent Bab, who's a known sports writer, respectable

sports writer, good sports writer. And just to get a sense of what Kim Luecki is saying, she's saying, quote, the lengths he's got to try to put a hit piece together after two years of trying to get me to sit with him for an interview context, LSU on Tuesday as we're getting ready for the first round game of this tournament with more than a dozen questions demanding a response by Thursday right before we're scheduled to tip off are you kidding me ridiculous deadline couldn't possibly meet it attempt to distract it ain't gonna work buddy etc etc did she say buddy yeah she did it's going to work buddy i've hired the best definition of the country I will sue the Washington Post if they publish a false story about me

She cannot possibly have hired the best defamation lawsuit or law firm in the country because any Competent Defamation attorney is going to tell her that she has no case The Washington Post is not going to defame her. The definition of defaming is that you publish something that you know is not true with the deliberate intention of hurting somebody.

That is not going to be the case here. So you're saying there's a law firm that wouldn't take a retainer waiting for the piece to come out? I'm sure there would. I think that woman, who is that woman? Sidney Powell? I think she may be available,

and I know Giuliani's available. He's gonna have to get some. I think he's disbarred. I think what bothered me about this, and I was watching it, and I was thinking about it a lot, that what gall she has, where in the same sentence she says, for two years he's been trying to get me,

but there's no way he gave me enough time by contacting me two days before. What The Washington Post did, and I've gotten these calls from media companies, hey, we're coming out with a story that we're working on, do you wanna comment? And I've also gotten the calls, hey, we're coming out with this story tomorrow,

we're giving you an opportunity to comment. So I've seen it both ways. And the newspaper's job is not to care when my next game is or what I'm distracted by. Their job is to see if I'll comment, and their job, which they do well, is to present the facts, have it fact checked, which there's fact checking to every article.

It's lawyered, every sentence is lawyered. An article like this, deeply lawyered. I mean, not a game recap, yes, but an article like this, a quote unquote hit piece is what she's calling it, the lawyers will have approved everything with an eye toward a defamation suit. They don't want to be susceptible to that. So I didn't know why she was protesting so much.

And now I'm gonna read the article, where before, if she didn't do this press conference, I would have read right past it. She's just taken from the playbook of if you think something bad is gonna get published, go ahead and say it's fake, it's wrong. Enemy of the people. And they don't care. I mean, by the way, she characterizes the Brian Kelly article as a hit piece. Right, the Press Post previously had reported. Which is not clear not clear it was no I'm gonna have to reveal haven't read it but I have read the analysis of it it's

not it basically was a piece about the fact that one of the poorest states in the country has prioritized paying Brian Kelly nine million nine million dollars a year by the way my guess is you have the Louisiana population vote over whether they'd like to pay $10 million for a coach and winning national championship. They would. I suppose that in the strife and effecting of this in which we're going to pay attention to this story when it comes out in ways that we wouldn't have otherwise. It brings us to the other even larger PR management story in sports, if you guys are okay to go there. Because the Otani thing, as we sit on it now, so much is happening, so much has happened, I should say.

Now it seems to be a bit of a resting state. And my in on this story with you guys, after seeing his press conference, after seeing the reports from ESPN and other places about the back and forth as to was Otani robbed as he is now claiming having $4.5 million stolen from him or was he actually betting on the game and what game it is, is of course not baseball according to Otani and not anything according to Otani, but according to the translator in question, his best friend, personal assistant, no longer his best friend ostensibly was other sports that are not baseball. All of that. It leads me to ask you guys losing track of four point five million dollars.

This is again, rich guys talking about rich guys stuff. How plausible is that? Could you imagine that happening? Don LeBretard, David Sampson, weirdo. Because he was not the fun substitute teacher who'd wheel out a TV and play a VHS tape of Armageddon in science class. He was the weird one who would eat an egg salad sandwich while clipping his toenails into the trash can and ranting about Ronald Reagan. Stugats!

The guy kept talking about how his ass was smooth. Smoother than a newborn's cheek. He wouldn't stop bragging about his bare buttocks to me. This is the Don LeBathard Show with the Stugats. Let's talk about this from an athlete standpoint. I would say yes. There are players who I've had, who if you asked them what their balance was

in their account, they would say they didn't know. I've had players including my favorite second baseman, a guy named Luis Castillo, who was not aware that his paycheck was not being deposited because he thought he had direct deposit and he had not signed up for it. So his paychecks were building up in his locker. And it happened that our finance department contacted me

and said, Luis Castillo has about $6 million of checks he has not deposited. And so we went up to him and he said, oh, Poppy, I had no idea. Literally, that's what he said. So is it possible that Otani doesn't know the balance? Yes.

Is it possible he doesn't pay his own bills? 100%. There's people who pay firms or individuals to pay their bills for them. Easy peasy. Is it possible that he's off by four and a half million with his balanced knowledge? 100%.

He's got money to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants to. Is it possible that his account wired money to an illegal bookmaker without Otani knowing or one of his agents, that is impossible. It seems quite implausible. I have a lot less money than Mr. Otani, but I cannot, nobody can get to my money and wire $10,000 out of the account without them calling me.

I cannot imagine you'd have some system set up or that somebody at the bank didn't go, oh, this is the ninth, is it nine? This is the ninth half a million dollar check going to some party that I can't find in the yellow pages. It's literally absurd. And what bothers me is that Otani did this statement and you as a journalist,

I would assume you would not have gone to that once you were not allowed to ask questions and you realized it was not a press conference. 70 of your colleagues still went, which upset me. I wanted them all to reject it and not show up because all I did was read a statement. That's not a press conference. So that's insulting to journalists, number one.

Number two, he didn't answer the very simple question that he could have answered, which is, yeah, I gave this guy E-Pay total authority and the bank guy uses Citibank and he's been doing wires for me for six years. That would have been something he could have said, but he didn't. And that's the biggest question,

not did he lose track of $4.5 million. Yeah, I think the question to me is just how plausibly scammable is Shohei Otani when it comes to a guy in his interpreter slash personal assistant slash best friend who's been with him since Japan, who has falsified other parts of his resume we now know, didn't graduate from UC Riverside, didn't translate for Hideki Okajima, the former reliever with the Red

Sox and the Yankees. So this guy is shady. And now the question is, Otani, you mentioned these phone calls from your bank when you're trying to wire money, right? If Otani is getting incoming phone calls of a financial nature, is his literal translator the person answering the phone talking in English to the bank. And is that an excuse, a plausible excuse, given the specific context of guy relying

on someone else as his essentially his his ward when it comes to important matters in his life in English? Yeah, this would be fantastic if the bank said in English, hey, we're wiring $500,000 to John Cocktoast and the bookie. And the interpreter says to Otani, yes, this wire for 50,000 is going to the Audi car company. And he says that in Japanese, Otani says yes, the bank hears yes, and then $500,000 is out the door. No.

Well, look, the question though, but it lines up with a larger through line, which you spoke to, both of you guys spoke to, which is that actually having lots of money does not mean you are financially sophisticated or diligent or detail oriented. Almost the opposite. And that's what I want people to understand here

is just that there is no correlation in all of these industries with money that you actually know what you're doing with your money second to second. Yeah. And I want to make sure I don't think either you are suggesting that Otani is guilty of doing anything other than being duped in a way. Right.

I mean, I don't think the natural, do you know? No, I do not know. But the question that you're thinking to John, I'm not willing to say it yet because I don't buy the story that that the wires, if the wires came to, right? I'm not willing to say it yet because I don't buy the story that the wires, if the wires came from his account, I'm not buying the fact that he or his advisors weren't aware of it. Right, so look, the nuance is,

was Otani doing this to cover up his own bets? Was he doing it to help a friend knowingly, which was what, of course, the interpreter claimed with Otani's camp's blessing initially to ESPN in a 90 minute interview, and then they realized, ah, shit, we shouldn't say that because it's an illegal bookmaker. And now, is all of this simply to clean up that,

to sever that connectivity that Otani first made? It certainly feels that way. His whole statement was merely, he was re-saying what he had said after they changed their story. That's all he did. Right. That's why there's an investigation.

And it's not just MLB. We're talking about the IRS. There's so many financial implications to what is their story. And the fact that there's a theft, there's been a report now that, there's people looking into this ESPN and other real journalists,

investigative journalists. They can't find anyone who's looking into this theft, any authority according to the ESPN report. Otani's camp has personally gone to. Because they said that, hey, we turn this over to the authorities. But it's not because Otani's camp reportedly has asked them to. And so their attempt to minimize a financial scandal around betting, I suppose brings us to the other financial scandal involving betting that I want to get to

Because this is John day Porter story bad like feels it just feels like the nightmare in ways that the Otani story Was merely an appetizer towards despite John day Porter being somebody that I would imagine 99% of America has never heard of before and So I just want to give you the very brief beats for people who aren't not familiar with Jontay Porter's Ouvra. January 26th, game against the Clippers. There was increased betting interest on the under

for a Jontay Porter prop bet. And the line there for this prop bet set around 5.5 points, 4.5 rebounds, 1.5 assists also an over under for made three pointers, which around 5.5 points, 4.5 rebounds, 1.5 assists also an overunder for made three pointers, which was 0.5. So we just get a sense of like, we're not expecting a lot out of this dude, but we can bet on his statistical benchmarks that evening. He plays four minutes, he leaves the game thereafter, say there's an eye injury, it's

aggravated. It suffered it actually four days early into Grizzlies and John Tate Porter leaves the game having not scored, having had three rebounds, having had one assist, and not attempting a three hitting the under on every single prop, and then playing the next game. And the next game. Well, the next day, actually, we should say Draft King Sportsbook, they say that the under on John Tate Porter's three pointers was the biggest money winner

for betters of any NBA player prop from games that evening. Okay. This does not feel like it's going to be that difficult to figure out if there was big money on him before he touched the court. Why would there be big money on John T. Porter? The only reason is that somebody knows something. It will be the responsibility of the leagues to investigate that. I'm assuming if John T. Porter is found to have been culpable and I have no knowledge of anything to know that he's culpable, other than this

looks awfully odd, and I'm assuming his playing career will be very short after this and then that will be quite a deterrent for other people to attempt to do similarly stupid things if in fact that's what he's done. I don't know enough about it. This is where we have to say that we're a DraftKings sponsored show and as is nothing personal new to DraftKings to say that we're a DraftKings sponsored show, and as is nothing personal, new to DraftKings network.

So this compliment to DraftKings, I would have said even were those things not to be true. The technology and what they're doing working with the leagues, getting the information to the leagues, these companies are doing everything they're supposed to do. Now it's the league's turn.

If I'm the NBA or the president of a team, I'm calling up my friend Adam or calling John to call my friend Adam and say, listen, we need to do something because this is the perfect, perfect person to make an example of. This isn't LeBron James. This isn't Shohei Otani. This is John T Porter.

We need to suspend him for life. Find a way to find out. If in fact, he is culpable. I'm gonna, okay, we can say if in fact he's culpable. I want an investigation right now because the systems we've put in place, I want the fans to know that these systems are working. That when you see irregularities, you're contacting us,

we're then investigating, and then we're acting on the investigation. There is no way that the under on Jean-Tay Porter was the biggest play in the NBA and then he leaves the game in three minutes. It's just not. It feels. It doesn't pass the smell test.

Yeah. And this is a time for the NBA to make a move. So a little cleanup. The second game in question was March 20th, some weeks later but again same deal only put a couple minutes due to an illness heavy bets on his prop unders and yeah it ranked super highly in terms of the sportsbooks you know own internal data on on here's where the technology needs to get a little better and i i know draft kings is working on it as are the leagues i want

to get the information to the leagues before tip off. When there is irregular betting, would anybody be against stopping all prop bets five minutes before a tip off? Is that, is it not good? Does all the money come within the last five minutes? I don't wanna take money out of anybody's pocket. But these are-

I do not know that. I think these are the questions about trade-offs that everyone has to contemplate, right? So I should point out this too. I'm not a natural better. I'm not someone who knows all the ins and outs, but it's obvious to me that a big difference in the era of legalized gambling, which I believe in philosophically, is better than the system that was before, where it was all illicit.

And of course, things happen that were incredibly shady and suspicious under that black market regime. The difference of legalized gambling is that now you have this menu of everything essentially, seemingly being bettable. And so, John Day Porter props didn't exist before, now they do. And so, the question is, where do you turn the dials on what minimums you have to hit on time constraints

on like talking to Coco before the show, he had this idea, which I thought was very interesting. What if you make it so that you can only bet on props for guys who play X number of minutes in the NBA minimum so that you filter out the guys who can most easily disappear seemingly having done nothing and yet done quite a bit to damage the integrity of the game.

I love his idea and there'll be many ideas like it and the technology's gonna keep getting better and in theory the ultimate payoff is getting information to leagues before tip-off and that then eliminates, imagine if the Rockets are told. It took till half time of the NCAA to get to the referee who had the conflict of interest in the Chattanooga game.

You read about, I hope you read about that. There was an NCAA referee who got pulled from refereeing an NCAA tournament game because did not disclose the conflict having gotten into green. As you know, I don't pay any attention to games that don't involve the big conferences. So I'm unaware of the Chattanooga.

It took the NCAA until halftime to get this referee pulled. They went into the locker room and said, you can't referee because you forgot to disclose that you have a conflict. So obviously they're one half too late. Ideally they would have figured this out before the game started. I would think the NCAA getting something half right would be above average. Such a hater of the NCAA. I'm not a hater.

You are, it's fine, you want the Super League. You want, you want, cause you're a fan of teams that would be in the Super League. No, no, you mistake my comments. My comments are, I don't hate the NCAA, I dislike their lack of effectiveness and how long it takes them to make decisions. And the fact that Jim Bayheim, and I'm not particularly a Syracuse fan, loses 200 games

like six years later because it takes them that long to figure out, figure something out. Half time is actually ahead of schedule. They're doing great. That's my point. They figure this out. This is the shortest investigation in. They're doing great. That's my point. If they figure this out, this is the shortest investigation in the history of the NCAA. So I think that the end of the story is that these prop bets, it's gonna continue.

It's good business and the league has embraced it and should, but they will continue to work on how to enforce. And that's why I'm watching for discipline because this is the, as I said, the right place to discipline a classic scared straight kind of a character to use to show on presentations in the preseason.

No, he's my reporter's brother. Yeah, and the champion who makes a lot of money makes over 30 million a year. Yeah, and it comes from a family who is not it's it's not the classic hard up. Oh, flag this guy. Although we don't have did have interesting crypto and all that, which is its own red flag, I suppose. But look, the question of like how states and governments regulate this, of course, is also part of the conversation. It's interesting that in New York, right? I believe this is true, Coco, correct me if I'm wrong in my ear,

but you can't bet on college player props because there is some recognition that met on college player props, because there is some recognition that that's a vulnerable population when it comes to the cost benefit. The logic, right? What we're talking about is truly we created all of these, if not entirely new, then certainly ever more conspicuous incentives. And the question is the cost benefit for these individual actors, who is most likely to follow those incentives to a logical conclusion when it comes to personal profit. And so you can have the government step in, you can have the league stepping, you can have the

sports books themselves step in. And I think all of them are going to have to figure out. We live in an era in which we want this to be legalized. I am not going to go the other way on that. I think like all of these vices that we have in America, disclosure, responsible treatment programs, genuine transparency and regulation is the solution to marijuana, to drug use at large, to alcohol, to all of the cigarettes, all this stuff. But it's not fixable when it comes to,

let's eliminate all the incentives that would wanna make somebody, I don't know, take the under on themselves. When you're giving the commercial for the way our population thinks about regulation and big government involvement versus not. Because what you're doing is you're just adding, you're adding a group of people or a situation

where you want more government regulation. Yes. I get what you're adding a group of people or a situation where you want more government regulation. Yes. I get what you're saying. And the trade off always is to think about is where does that slippery slope end? How involved do we want our government to be? Can't we have the NCAA, the ineffective NCAA that you can't stand or dislike how slow they are?

Which is it exactly? You dislike that they can't stand or dislike how slow they are, which is it exactly you dislike that they can't effectively govern? I dislike that they cannot effectively govern. All right, so he's on record with that now. So we can confidently say that. Wait, who's gonna govern when there's no NCAA? The conferences themselves?

Yes. And you found that that works? It'll work for them. I like that we now, can we do a whole show on this please? We now pivoted to a deposition. Because I can't, I talk to John about this every week. But this speaks to what we're talking about,

which is who is doing the regulating, who is the check and the balance on an economy that is now flush with money that everybody wants and arguably will never say no to when given the alternative of way less. Yes. And that's why I don't believe that it's draft kings. It's not their job to figure out how to regulate or punish Porter.

So it's their job to give the info info, which they've done. And so it can't be or can be cannot be right. I think that when it comes to the state question, and by the way, I'm not somebody who wants the nanny state for all of these things. I've just seen the value of taxing right, taxing legal marijuana,

regulating it versus just having it live on the black market. But to this general concept, no college profits in America, the states that don't have those Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oregon, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia.

So a deeply decentralized approach, there's no federal approach. Red and blue everywhere. But you may draw some conclusions about which nanny states like to nanny, yeah. So I'm fascinated to see where this ends with props. NCA is trying to figure out a way and they're trying to go the federal route

to eliminate college prop bets in all states. And they're gonna want some sort of impact statement from the companies and from leagues. And it's a tough one. Does a company like DraftKings come out against this? Do they come out in favor of it? Are they neutral? I think that the revenue they would get from this

gets replaced because people want to gamble and they will find different things to gamble on if they can't gamble on college props. I'm actually sort of in Pablo's camp here with the nanny state. I wouldn't call it nanny state. This would be- There's bad politics by me.

This- Self-loan. It would be one of the things that all these companies are doing and the leagues are dealing with now is I don't know how many states it's now legal in 35 somewhere between 38 and 40. I may be wrong. I've read that a lot. And there are 35 to 40 different sets of rules. It's inefficient. Yeah.

It would be much better to have in this case federal oversight at one point I think everybody thought the legislature that the legislature at some point would pass the US Congress would pass guidelines for Online betting and they have not think about the government that there's certain things that they leave to the states and we're okay with As as citizens when we're driving on the highway, sometimes it's 70 miles per hour speed limit, then we cross state lines and it's 65

and we adjust on the fly. There's certain things that we don't want to adjust to. Differences in how airplanes get regulated. We want every state when I go to an airport that everybody is treating their planes the same way other than Boeing, so you want the FAA. To me, gambling, I don't know that it has to be federally regulated when there's people in different states,

you turn your phone on and you say, oh, that's not available here. All right, and then you go on to what is available. So I don't know if this rises to the level of things that need to be federally handled, but it is going to be an interesting case. Yeah, I'm a Hamiltonian. We would have been better off

without the states being quite so powerful and we see the result of that right now. And we end up with basically two sets of states that do different things. I'm not positive that's advantageous. I understand why you're saying that and we're not gonna get too political here, but. And we're not going to get too political here. But I think John just alluded to Federalist number 28.

So we are well beyond the point at which we are unpolitical. I think that I would rather look issue by issue than make blanket statements the way you're making. That's probably wise. Yeah, I think, look, the question here. I love you, man. Yeah, I think, look, the question here. Love you, man. The question here is how do you prevent

what used to be an existential risk from feeling like it? Right, let's talk about this from the theater of it. I think David started there, right? You want to make it so that no one worries about this, even though it's now literally a story that comes up every two days. Who do we believe that we've gone backwards or forwards in terms of the integrity of the games?

I would suggest that we've probably gone forward. I think we've gone sideways. I think that these gambling issues have always existed. They were just left undercover for a long time. There were never companies investigating, looking at trends and then reporting them to the league. So it's one of those things where there's social media, there's video of everything.

So people have this strange recency bias. There's a lot more crime on subway in New York is a great one. But if you look at the stats of it, it's actually not the case. But every time there is one, we get horrible video of it that we look at and it's in total nightmare.

There are more planes where the tires are falling off. I just don't know. I imagine, and this is semi-informed speculation, so take it for what it's worth. I imagine that the leagues are enforcing and monitoring and punishing even in ways that are not disclosed to the public because the technology is such that to

David's point you can actually be ahead of this and I think for that reason I believe that we probably are better definitively than we used to be in protecting integrity of the game the question is are the incentives so great that these marginal cases right so Dante poor did not affect the outcome of the game he affected the historical record from being as pure as it would have otherwise been in the absence of prop bets. And that's what we're losing.

Can we stop that while we're also really so much better at preventing game fixing as a factual matter? I think we probably are. I think the technology has probably made it better. And my guess would be there was more cheating in the past. Yeah, I still will stick with where I was, which is it's just being caught more than it was. The players have been gambling forever. People have been betting on sports forever. It's just way easier now on a phone than meeting some guy at the corner of grocery store on Sundays to pay your tab.

Yeah. Those people now, but it's also, I could argue more under control because other than the interpreter, you have to bet with money that you deposit. Where with a bookie- Other than the interpreter. It's the, well, he couldn't have.

Other than, right, you have, it's all money you have as opposed to the bookies where it's money that you don't have. And I think the reality is that there isn't supposed to be. There is no easy solution, definitionally. And what we're seeing truly is what John had alluded to before, which is something happening slowly, and then suddenly, the avalanche of this month,

specifically all of it happening at the same time. It's like someone dying. It's really quick at the end, even if they've been dying for years, like the last day. Yeah, that last moment. Very, very fast. I once asked somebody how some member of their family was. They'd been sick and I said, how's he doing? He said he's dead. And I said, that's as sick as you can be. On that perfect note, John Skipper, David Sampson, thank you for spending some of your some of your days with me, as long as you still have them. Thank you, Pablo.